2016 Goals – How did I do?

Last January I set some general goals for myself to achieve during the year. In June I got more specific about my goals and made them into goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. I did a reasonably good job reviewing and reporting on my progress every month. Some months I didn’t have time to write, but I did review and continue working towards my goals.

Here is my wrap up on how I did before setting out on new objectives for 2017!

Get Back in Shape

SMART Goal: My goal was to lose 10 lbs. by the end of 2016. I was going to do this by tracking my food intake, reducing my snacking and eating more appropriate portions of food. I was going to increase my physical activity by going to the gym, Aikido training and biking to work.

I did track my food intake, but not consistently throughout the year. I went to the gym regularly at the beginning of the year. In the spring I stopped going to the gym after I started Aikido training with my eight year old. It was challenging to maintain the schedule of classes and when we stopped for the summer, we never got around to restarting in the fall. I started a new job at the end of the summer and our office is on the 8th floor so I climb the stairs pretty regularly when I am in the office – although most days I work from home. I try to do the stairs two-three times a day when I am in the office. When I work from home I sporadically go for walks at lunch.

I didn’t achieve my weight goal. I don’t have a scale so I don’t know what I was down to at the beginning of December, my clothes were fitting better though so I know I had dropped some weight. Weighing myself at the end of December after two weeks of gorging on chocolate and several large festive meals is probably not the right time to do it. I am up a couple of pounds since my last measurement. I do feel better than I did at the start of the year and I am generally eating better and somewhat more active physically.

I have work to do in 2017 and this will be an ongoing project with a more specific plan and realistic objectives.

Expand Thomas Woodcrafts

SMART Goals: Rebuild ThomasWoodcrafts.com to improve site management, customer experience and marketing platform; write promotional blog posts and send out a monthly newsletter; Exhibit and sell at three – four craft shows in the fall; develop an online marketing strategy and implement it; sell at least $500 worth of product per month by October.

It took me a while to get around to rebuilding the website, but I got it done and then I got hacked and had to rebuild it again. The end result is a cleaner site both in terms of appearance and on the administrative side. I still have some cleaning up to do and I need to rewrite the product descriptions to make them more appealing and informative. That will be a project for 2017.

I have produced four newsletters since early November and now that I am through the fall promotional period I will settle into writing one per month. I had written several promotional blog posts prior to November, but lost all of them when I had to rebuild my site. I forgot to copy and save them before deleting and rebuilding the site from scratch. Since November early November I have written three posts and will continue writing one – two posts per month.

I exhibited at four craft shows this year, one in the spring that was a complete waste of time for all vendors. There was very little traffic through the show and most of us lost money at that show. I did three shows in the fall with varying degrees of success, all were worthwhile and I made money at all of them. One of the shows provided a space for a conversation with a mum who was looking for small wooden cars and that conversation resulted in a new product. I know make purse cars, which has provided me with another avenue for using up scrap wood. I sold 20 of these cars in the last few weeks of December.

I achieved my goal of at least $500 in sales per month started in September and already have orders for January that will almost get me to that goal.

I did not get around to putting together a marketing strategy. I do have one that is partially developed. I did test out some different types of marketing in December that will help to inform the strategy that is in development for 2017.

Grow DadGoesRound Blog

SMART Goals: rebuild DadGoesRound.com; write evergreen content in the form of Dad Guides; make my Dad Guide: Your Daughter and her period available as an e-book for sale; clean up archive posts to add images where they are missing; submit guest content to other sites; increase readership to 10 000 by the end of 2016; publish one to two sponsored blog posts per month; generate revenue from the site through affiliate links and advertising on my site.

I rebuilt my site and re-oriented my site in March. I was struggling with what to write for the previous six months or so since I had decided to reduce the amount of information and number of images I provided about my kids to respect their privacy as they get older. I started producing Dad Guides on a weekly basis for several months and then life got busier and it got harder to find the time to produce them on a weekly basis. I will continue writing the guides in 2017.

The first of the Dad Guides was a series of four posts to help dads learn about menstruation and prepare to support their daughters when they got their first periods and puberty generally. I then edited them all together into a .pdf with the intent of converting it to an e-book format for sale. I still haven’t completed the final step of editing and making the e-book available for sale. This will be a project to complete in early 2017.

I am almost done cleaning up the old posts to add images. I was doing two a week and now I just do them as I encounter them. This task will be completed early in the new year.

I have started submitting older content to other sites and had one published on the Good Men Project in December. I am making a shift in strategy in 2017 that will give me more time for submitting content to other sites in the new year.

I had increased my readership to 6000 by June and expected to see growth continue for the rest of the year, but that didn’t happen. In part because life happened and my posting schedule became irregular and I had less time to focus on driving traffic. I am seeing regular traffic every day to my evergreen dad guides and some of my older content that I have been promoting through Pinterest and other platforms. I am taking lessons learned from this year to inform my approach for 2017 to increase traffic to the site.

I was producing a couple of sponsored posts a month for several months and I have written posts that include affiliate marketing and will continue to produce these posts. The job I started in August pays better than my last job so I feel less pressure to generate revenue from my blog. I will be writing these types of posts as I find opportunities of interest, but without a specific target.

More Family Time

My SMART Goal was to sit down as a family and develop a plan on how to spend more quality time together.

That didn’t happen.

My new job offers the same kind of flexibility as my previous one, with less travel so I am around more and working from home more often. The lunchtime walks with my partner were a great way to spend time together without kids when we were taking them. We fell out of the habit over the past month or so as the weather got colder and I needed to use most of my spare time to make products ordered from Thomas Woodcrafts before Christmas.

I did also make more effort to spend more time with my kids throughout the year and say yes more often to their request to do activities together. I have some thoughts on how to do a better job of this in 2017.

Smile More

It took a while to land on a strategy for how to achieve this goal. Then I hit on a simple SMART Goal – schedule reminders in my calendar to smile. It did it and it works. I see the reminder and regardless of what I am doing or how I am feeling I smile. It improves my mood every single time. I can put this one in the win category with a smile on my face.

This blog is not a blog about politics. It is my space to write about issues related to parenting.

And yet…

It hasn’t even been a week since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. For the first few days I was shocked that he won. I’m no longer shocked. I think I understand at least some of what happened. Remembrance Day gave me the space to shift gears and start to think about resistance.

Standing up for others

I have the luxury of being in Canada and not feeling like I am personally at risk to think about how I can be helpful and resist Trump and his supporters and copycats. My partner and I have been talking with our two oldest daughters about Trump and the danger he presents ever since he was nominated as the Republican Nominee. We have consistently encouraged them to speak up and help those who they see being bullied at school and to tell us or their teachers if they witness anyone being harassed because of the colour of their skin. This weekend we talked with them about some of the hate crimes happening since Trump’s election. We have reinforced the importance of standing up for their schoolmates and of telling us or a teacher about any situations that they see. We have added a caution to look out for their own safety first.

Trumpism at schools in Canada

I’d like to say that I can safely ignore what is happening in the US because I am in a different country and we rejected these kinds of politics in our last election . . . and yet . . . there were police reports today about a swastika and ‘KKK’ being spray-painted on an elementary school in the city. We have heard reports from friends about situations at their kids’ schools where kid were chanting in support of Trump or blocking access to the school to anyone who didn’t vote for Trump – which is ridiculous on several levels. At our school there was apparently a parade of kids marching around the playground chanting ‘Down with Trump.’

Even though Donald Trump was elected President of another country, he and his message have leaked across the border and are impacting kids in our schools and my role as a parent here in Canada.

Figuring out how to resist

I still don’t know exactly how I am going to resist the Trump ideology and the racists and sexists that have been emboldened as a result of his election win. As I said above I never intended for this blog to be a political blog. In the current climate I could write something everyday about Trumpism and the words he is saying and the actions he is taking – like appointing Steve Bannon his racist-in-chief yesterday.

I need to keep my family safe and I need to figure out how to help other families feel safe while actively taking steps to push back against the more public racism and sexism unleashed by Trump and Pence.

Handmaid’s Tale coming to life?

I want to return to a normal world where I don’t feel like I am watching the prologue to The Handmaid’s Tale. I had hopes that Trump would discover he had no idea what he was talking about on the election trail and he would get ground down by the system and turn out to a mediocre president who made poor choices about Twitter and governed in the mould of most Republicans. I had hopes he would appoint smart people who would help him do a relatively good job without violating the civil rights of tens of millions of Americans. The early signs are not good. I am actually more concerned about Mike Pence than I am of Donald Trump. I am pretty sure that Pence would feel most comfortable if he could install a theocracy in the US instead of this democracy thing.

Shifting Gears

So I think what I am going to do here is try to return to my regularly scheduled programming and confine my posts about current affairs to one every week or so. I cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening. It is changing the world my daughters live in and I can’t stand by and not say anything. So I will speak up and I will use this platform to write about politics on a more regular basis than I originally intended. I’ll let you know when I figure out the actions I am going to take to support the women and people of colour in my community and push back against everything Donald Trump, Mike Pence and his more rabid supporters stand for.

I am not sure what my next post is going to be. I am going to write something not about US politics and the election fallout so I can bring some balance to my brain. I welcome your input on what you would like me to write about in the future.

Fear and Hope

Lest We Forget

Yesterday was Remembrance Day in Canada. The day on which we gather as a nation to remember those who served and fought to defend our way of life. It is the day we remind ourselves of the tragedy of war and say we will never let it happen again.

Except that it does happen again. Conflict is a regular feature of human existence and sometimes those conflicts break out into armed warfare.

Remembrance

I am not a religious person in any way. That said, Remembrance Day is my holy day. I studied history in university and quite a bit of those studies focused on war. I also grew up hearing stories from my grandparents. My grandfather served in the British Merchant Marine during the Second World War and survived the sinking of four of the ships he served on. My grandmother, her parents and sisters lived in London during the blitz and they survived the daily bombings of the city, including one bomb that fell on the church at the end of their street. I remember stories about life in the city during the blitz.

Resistance and Bagpipes

On Remembrance Day I think about those who served in the military. I also increasingly think about military families and civilians affect by war. I also think about those willing to put their lives on the line for something they believe in. They are not always the same as the people who serve in the military. They are the people who stood up as resistance fighters against the Nazis in occupied Europe. They are the people who resisted the communists behind the Iron Curtain and those who resist Vladimir Putin today. They are the people who rose up against governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. And they are the people who stand against the vicious government in Syria. They are also the people who fight for freedom and what is right by using their positions to protect those with those with less power than themselves.

So today I was thinking about all these people as I sat in the gym watching the Remembrance Day assembly at my kids’ school – and crying at the little boy playing the bagpipes on his own after his class finished their presentation. Bagpipes were for a time banned by the English who saw them a tool of resistance for the Scots. I am a sucker for pipers and the emotion of the past week caught up with me.

I was also thinking about Donald Trump.

Trump’s America

Like many people – I am afraid of what he may do as president. More so, I am afraid of what his supporters will do.

I am not an American. I do not live in the United States and even if I did, the fact that I am a straight, white male would likely protect me from many of his more aggressive supporters.

We are hearing daily reports about violence and mostly racist abuse and attacks by those unleashed by Trump’s rhetoric. I haven’t encountered any reports of Trump-fuelled sexual violence, but with Mike Pence at his side, we can be sure that women’s health services and reproductive rights will be under assault. So far Trump’s America sounds like it is set to be a meaner, more violent place, particularly for those who are not straight, white men.

Never Again

Today’s Remembrance Day ceremonies gave me hope and a sense of resolve. The world has faced men of Trump’s ilk before and survived. The forces of fear and hate can be pushed back and beaten.

Today as I thought about the civilians and resistance fighters from military conflicts, I also thought about those in America who are afraid for their safety in Trump’s America. I thought about those who will resist him and his attempts to mould the United States in his image. The resistance is already emerging in the form of street protests. Their challenge will be to figure out how to resist Trump and his supports in as peaceful a way as possible.

Fascists Get Elected

Donald Trump was democratically elected by a coalition of racists, sexists, xenophobes and many others who chose to turn a blind eye to the threat that this con man poses to their country. Some of them are people who feel left behind and think they need a ‘strongman’ in power to protect them and make their lives better.

That is how Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin came to power.

Safety Pins and Resistance

I am a Canadian living in Canada. I will not bear the brunt of Trump’s vision for America. I do however need to resist him and those who support him. I need to resist to protect my country, my community, my friends and family. I am not quite sure how to do that just yet.

There is a movement underway in which people who are allies of those who feel most afraid and powerless, are wearing a safety pin as a symbol that they are safe. So as a start I will cover my clothes in safety pins and tell everyone what they mean. I will carry spare ones in my pocket so that I can pass them out to others who want to join the resistance and demonstrate their support for those who are afraid and at risk.

A Family Project

My partner and I will also start a conversation with our kids about what is happening and come up with ideas on what we can do as a family to resist. We can reach out to immigrant-serving organizations and become a mentor to a family new to Canada. We can invite them to dinner and help them navigate their new home. We can be a safe space to help them when they need it. We can talk to our kids about bullies and the need to stand up to them, especially if they are spreading hate. I’m not sure exactly what, but I know we can do better to support and raise up those with less privilege than us. I will encourage and support women who seek elected office. We can push back against hateful rhetoric and abuse. We can speak out against those who seek to take away liberties and propagate racist, sexist, hateful ideas and ideologies. We can and must do better.

How Can I Help?

I know that Americans will survive a Trump regime. It is possible that he won’t be as bad as he promised and as he has demonstrated in his life to this point. I am not particularly hopeful. We are here to support you, America. If any of you feel the need to flee to safety north of the border, drop me a line and I will help if I can. I am already helping one couple who are considering making the move. If you just need some respite, come and see us for a vacation, you can crash amongst the playroom toys and I’ll tell you about my favourite words that are properly spelled with a ‘u’. I will do my part to resist hate here in Canada and support those who are afraid, in danger and need help.

I am open to all suggestions about how we can help and resist. How will you step up?

November Update

At the beginning of the year I set out some goals for myself for the year and I have been doing a reasonably good job of tracking my progress in monthly posts, although September didn’t get an end of month update so this one will have to cover my progress for September and October.

2016 SMART Goals

At the end of June I updated my general 2016 goals to SMART goals. That is, goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. Now each month I review my goals from the previous month and update what I plan to accomplish in the coming month.

The goals I set in January along with the updated SMART goals from June are below.

Get Back in Shape

SMART Goal: I am going to lose 10 lbs. by the end of 2016. I will do this by tracking my food intake, reducing my snacking and eating more appropriate portions of food. I will continue going to Aikido and biking to work as often as possible.

Well… I have not rejoined Aikido and I have not biked to work since July. I started a new job in August and apparently our office building doesn’t have a shower facility unless I pay to join the gym in the building. I also have a flat tire and they are super hard to change.

Admittedly I have some excuses here. Actually the biking thing is more about habit than anything. I am working from home fairly regularly and I have not settled into a sufficiently consistent rhythm in the new job. I am still adjusting to the new job and the new schedule since my work day stars and ends an hour earlier and i just haven’t sorted myself out to add biking into the mix.

I don’t have any excuse about rejoining Aikido. Life was too crazy in September to add in anything new and while my new job pays more, we are still getting caught up from having a month of no regular income as I switched jobs and pay periods. So adding another expense isn’t quite on the table yet. I think the realistic thing to do is to plan to restart in January once everything has settled down.

On the upside I am climbing the stairs to my eighth floor office most mornings that I work at the office and I aim to take a break once in the morning and once in the afternoon to walk down and back up the stairs. I fell out of the habit for a few weeks, but I am back into it. Most days I am able to do it twice, some days I have meetings that get in the way and then on days I work from home I only have one flight of stairs to climb. This week though, my wife and I have started going for walks at lunch when I am working from home, which is doubly great – exercise and time together holding hands.

We are both also tracking our food intake and are both doing well. Most days we are slightly over or under our targets for the day. Of course now we have halloween candy in the house and that is not going to help the situation. We don’t own a scale so I don’t know how I am doing on my goal towards losing 10 lbs. by the end of the year. I’ll find a scale at some point and jump on it to see how things are going.

Expand Thomas Woodcrafts

SMART Goals:

I am going to rebuild ThomasWoodcrafts.com to make it easier to use from the back end and more attractive and useful for shoppers. I will complete the rebuild of this site by the end of September.

I am going to write one promotional blog post and send out one newsletter to my mailing list every month.

I will sell my products at three – four craft shows in the fall. I will identify two more shows to apply for and submit applications by the end of the summer or as soon as the applications open.

I will develop an online marketing strategy by the end of July and implement that strategy starting in August.

I will sell at least $500 worth of product per month by October.

The website rebuild is done. Or at least as done as I ever consider any rebuild. Tweaking and adjusting will continue on an ad hoc basis. I’ll take another serious look at it in January when i’m not busy making product for craft shows and filling product orders. I am pretty happy with the results and now just have to make the effort to maintain and update it every month so that it remains current and doesn’t fall into a state of disrepair due to neglect like my previous site did.

I have not kept up with writing a promotional blog post per month, but I did get my first newsletter out which I am pretty excited about and have already had one response that will soon be an order. For this month I am going to schedule a couple of blog posts and do the same for December. It is a little more challenging coming up with blog content on a store site than for this blog where I can write about anything I want. I have some thoughts for the rest of the year and then for the new year one of my goals will be to map out an editorial calendar for the Thomas Woodcrafts site and produce content a couple of times a month.

I have done one craft show so far and have two coming up in early December so I have hit my three show target for the fall. There have been a few others I could have jumped in on, but decided not to push my capacity beyond what I know I can do.

Still no online marketing strategy. I have a loose one in my head that I am following. I am going to bump this to the new year as well when sales slow down and I have some more time for thinking and planning.

Sell $500 per month by October – Done. September was great, October was on target. We’ll see how November goes and I have high hopes for December since I’ll be doing two shows that month.

Grow DadGoesRound Blog

SMART Goals:

Convert my Dad Guide: Your Daughter and Her Period e-book which is currently only available as a PDF for newsletter subscribers to a e-book format for e-readers and make it available for sale through e-book vendors by the end of July

I will clean up two-three archive posts a week to include images until they are done. I am not sure how many I have that need this kind of updating.

I will develop a list of other sites where I would like to submit guest content by the end of September and I will submit two pieces of guest content to other sites every month with a goal of having one published very couple of months by the end of the year.

I will continue the work I have been doing to promote the blog and increase my readership. I will increase my readership from my current level of 6000/month to 10000/month by the end of 2016.

I will continue to seek sponsorship opportunities and will publish one to two pieces of sponsored content per month.

I will continue to review and add advertising and affiliate links to generate revenue without significantly impacting the readability of the site and content.

The Dad Guide has not yet been converted to an e-book. I need to get on that. I’ll get that done this month.

Archive post clean up continues, but at a slower pace than I set out for myself. Turns out that goal wasn’t realistic, mostly because it is time-consuming and kind of boring.

I have a list of other sites where I can think I will be a good fit and have started reaching out to those sites to clarify submission process and I plan to have my first submission in to another site this coming weekend.

My readership has been declining. In part due to my somewhat irregular posting cycle and in large part because it has become so much harder to get content in front of people via Facebook, which was a major traffic source for me in the past. I am growing my traffic from Pinterest and my baseline numbers every day are pretty consistent when I haven’t posted anything new so I know that my strategy of producing more evergreen content in the form of dad guides is working.

I’ve become a little less focused on securing sponsored posts since I started my new job. The pay is better and I feel less pressure to use my blog to bring in extra revenue. I am still working on sponsored posts though and have some new ones coming.

I continue to test out different ways to generate revenue through ads and affiliate promotions. I ditched google ads because I didn’t have any control over the ads that were shown on my site and I have instead set up a revolving group of banner ads that I am comfortable with and I’ll switch those up periodically. I will likely also build ads into some of my blog posts on occasion if it seems like a good fit.

More Family Time

My SMART Goal was to sit down as a family and develop a plan on how to spend more quality time together.

That hasn’t happened.

However, my new job offers the same kind of flexibility as my previous one, with less travel so I am around more and am starting to work from home more as I get the hang of the job. The lunchtime walks with my partner are a nice addition to quality time together for us, when we aren’t wiped out at the end of the day and just staring at the TV screen.

I do feel that even without a plan that I am committing more quality time to my kids. We are doing more puzzles and more reading together. I am finding time to chat one-on-one with them a little more often. The best development on that front is that my three year old has started telling me about her day at bedtime. I didn’t start this one, she has just started telling me that she wants to tell me about her day. So we talk a bit and she gives me the highlights of her day. It is pretty awesome.

Smile More

It took a while to land on a strategy for how to achieve this goal. Then I hit on a simple SMART Goal – schedule reminders in my calendar to smile. It did it and it works. I see the reminder and regardless of what I am doing or how I am feeling I smile. It improves my mood every single time. I can put this one in the win category with a smile on my face.

My Goals for November

I am comfortable with what I am doing to get in better shape. Stair climbing at work and walking when working from home, plus tracking my food intake all feels good and feels like it is working. I am going to keep it up for the rest of the year.

Thomas Woodcrafts – Things are going well. I will produce a couple of promotional blog posts and send out another newsletter. I will mostly be focused on building up my inventory in advance of the two craft shows in early December and making efforts to market my products online to capture holiday sales.

DadGoesRound – I’ll continue to publish at least two posts per week here and I will start submitting content to other sites. I’ll continue to clean up archive posts and I am going to finally get the Dad Guide to your Daughter’s Period edited and converted to an e-book.

I will continue to look for opportunities to spend quality time with my kids and take advantage of lunchtime walks with my partner so that we can get some quality time together without children at least a couple of times a week.

I will continue to smile every time my phone tells me to and I might even smile some times when I am not reminded by my phone.

Billy Bush could have helped us grow

Billy Bush has been fired from the Today Show following the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape featuring Bush talking with and egging on Donald Trump as they both denigrated women and Trump confessed to sexual assault.

NBC is making a mistake

NBC is now trying to mitigate damage to their morning show and try to move on from this situation. As I have written before, this conversation between Trump and Bush is a prime example of rape culture. What both of them said is abhorrent. That said, NBC’s decision to fire Bush is a mistake and a lost opportunity. [Read more…]